I have a question for the GPU super users. I was at Microcenter today and saw a GT 430 in PCI. I looked it up real quick on my phone and it seemed like a decent cheap card. I thought cool I could put that in one of my empty pci slots.

I got home put it in the bottom slot and the system wouldn't boot. Everything powered on, but the monitor stayed blank. I moved it up a slot and the same thing. I even tried moving the monitor cord down to it...nothing.

Did I get a bum card or am I missing something? It was the only one in the store :(

I'm trying to use remote desktop to get to my other computer, I have an MSI mother board and an AMD X6 processor with an Nvidia 550 TI. When I remote into it, it says the GPU is missing. When I hook my keyboard and monitor directly to it, it still says the GPU is missing. I exit BOINC completly and then reload it. It will recognize it then. I did notice a couple of times that I would get an error from the Catalyst Manager so I uninstalled it, rebooted etc since I'm not running a Radion card.

Any suggestions? Oh, I'm running Windows 7 Professional on both systems.

remote desktop has been known to kill the Video card drivers and crash WU's

Your best bet for remoting into your PC is using Logmein. It can be used for free and works without killing processes. The only setback is that it doesnt work with Linux machines
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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

I'm not sure... I'm a little stumped. I've never used more than one video card in a system so I'm not exactly sure why it doesn't work in your system. If I can think of anything, I'll post again. In the meantime, maybe someone else has an idea....

I think I solved the problem....
I emailed Zotac and Biostar and chatted with a few people on other boards...

I'll take the POS back!
Then Buy a cheap MB and a few gigs of ram. I'll donate this computer's processor combined with new the MB and ram to fix one of these old Intel boxes sitting around. I have two Pentium D systems that both have issues. Then I'll throw in that phenom II x6 I have wanted and everyone is happy!

I have a question for the GPU super users. I was at Microcenter today and saw a GT 430 in PCI. I looked it up real quick on my phone and it seemed like a decent cheap card. I thought cool I could put that in one of my empty pci slots.

I got home put it in the bottom slot and the system wouldn't boot. Everything powered on, but the monitor stayed blank. I moved it up a slot and the same thing. I even tried moving the monitor cord down to it...nothing.

Did I get a bum card or am I missing something? It was the only one in the store :(

I thought GPU's have to be SLI or Crossfire (for AMD) in order to use more than one GPU on a system? I have GT 430's in 3 of my systems PCI-E slots, but each of those systems have 2 regular PCI slots empty- I would be able to put the plain PCI version of the GT 430 in those slots as well so that SETI can crunch with 3 GPU's on each system? (assuming your PSU's could handle it)
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I thought GPU's have to be SLI or Crossfire (for AMD) in order to use more than one GPU on a system?

Actually, just the opposite. SLI (IDNK about Crossfire) forces the GPU's to work as one, and that's the way BOINC sees them. Running GPU's as individual units allows them to work individually.
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yes i've understood that SLI and Crossfire allow for 2 gpu's to function as one, but i thought that was the only way to run more than one GPU on a sytem. Now that I know running them independently is also a possibility. SO BOINC will be able to detect more than one GPU in that case and assign tasks to each GPU automatically etc..? How does the computer know when or which card to use when it kicks in automatically during other computer tasks?

using the SLI setup, BOINC would assign one task for both of the cards since they will essentially be showing up as a single piece of hardware.. does SLI or crossfire essentially "double" the performance of the card? if you have two gtx 590's they will essentially both essentially work one 50% of a given task and complete it in half the time that one 590, right?
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yes i've understood that SLI and Crossfire allow for 2 gpu's to function as one, but i thought that was the only way to run more than one GPU on a sytem. Now that I know running them independently is also a possibility. SO BOINC will be able to detect more than one GPU in that case and assign tasks to each GPU automatically etc..? How does the computer know when or which card to use when it kicks in automatically during other computer tasks?

using the SLI setup, BOINC would assign one task for both of the cards since they will essentially be showing up as a single piece of hardware.. does SLI or crossfire essentially "double" the performance of the card? if you have two gtx 590's they will essentially both essentially work one 50% of a given task and complete it in half the time that one 590, right?

BOINC reads your system config and determines your available GPU's. Look at my computers, and you can see one has 2 580's, another has 2 590's. The Lunatics software then checks on each new WU startup, sees what card is avaialable, and assigns it to task automatically.

There wouldn't be a doubling of performance in SLI; any task uses a finite amount of resources. However, by reducing the amount of GPU per WU, you can do more than one task at a time on Fermi and Kepler class cards. For example, my 590's each do 2 tasks per core simultaneously, or 4 per card. The 580's can do 3 WU's simultaneously. This requires a command line addition to an app_info XML file.

EDIT: I should add that running multiple WU's on one GPU core simultaneously does degarde performance vs. running just one WU per core, however, that degradation isn't so much as to offset the overall performance gains of running multiple instances. Each card has it's own "sweet spot"; it's trial and error to find the one for your particular card.
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using the SLI setup, BOINC would assign one task for both of the cards since they will essentially be showing up as a single piece of hardware.. does SLI or crossfire essentially "double" the performance of the card? if you have two gtx 590's they will essentially both essentially work one 50% of a given task and complete it in half the time that one 590, right?

Actually SLI/Crossfire doesn't double the performance over the single card. However it is a significant increase say about a gain of 70%. The general idea was to future proof you system. If in a few years your computer wont play a game you want you just buy an identical card, hopefully cheep by then, and poof much faster... Go play.

Not that people don't go out and buy the fastest cards they can and SLI them now...

And now about your PCI slots if your board is a Biostar they do not support any video other than from their PCIe slots. Here is what they told me in an email. "TA990FXE motherboard supports PCI-express video devices only. There are four total PCI-express slots. If using multiple video cards, we suggest to use the same model.support@biostar-usa.com 626-581-1055"
I have two different video cards in two slots and they work just fine.